Visual design
Interaction design
Mobile app
Role
UX Design, UX Research, Wireframing, Prototyping
Timeline
48 hours, February 2023
Team
4 UX Designers
Tools
Figma
Overview
Background
Immigrants and refugees struggle with job searching in a new country as a result of cultural differences in professional standards and lack of community and professional connections.
In 2021, 23% of the Canadian population consisted of immigrants. It’s great that this number is high, but the current system doesn’t adequately support the people coming in. 36% of new immigrants and refugees live in poverty as a result of this system. Furthermore by 2023, Canada aims to welcome 465,000 new permanent residents which will only increase the difficulty for these residents to search for jobs.
Problem
How might we help new Canadians in their professional journeys and make sure that job-searching is equal for everybody living in Canada regardless of their backgrounds?
Our Solution
Introducing Avenir: an all-in-one career helper app creating equal job-searching opportunities for newcomers
Avenir assists newcomers through various resources such as saving and translating job postings, and resume review, to alleviate the pressures of the job-searching process in a new country.
Check out our prototype below!
Find out how we got here 👇
Design Process
How did we create Avenir?
Empathize
Group Interview
Define
Problem
Target Audience
Goals
Ideate
Feature Brainstorming
Comp. Analysis
User Flows
Empathize
Group Interview
Our group mostly comprised of immigrants or children to immigrant parents who have experienced the difficulty in job-seeking, so we considered what helped us when going through this process and what would've been nice to have. We performed an internal group interview to share our thoughts and what we struggled with in the past in relation to job-seeking.
Thoughts on the current job search process:
Define
What's the problem?
From the design challenge and what we discovered in our group interview, we determined the problem. Immigrants and refugees struggle with job searching in a new country as a result of a cultural differences in professional standards and lack of connections.
Who's our target audience?
From the design challenge and what we discovered in our group interview, we determined the problem. Immigrants and refugees struggle with job searching in a new country as a result of a cultural differences in professional standards and lack of connections.
What are our goals?
Provide accessible resources and support for those looking to get a job.
Increase the overall employment rate for immigrants and refugees
Increase users' professional circle and community.
User Personas
Once we understood our goals, we created two user personas, Sophia and Gonzalez, to gain a better understanding of our target audience.
Meet Sophia and Gonzalez — two unemployed immigrants struggling in the job-search market
Sophia
Unemployed New Grad, Graduated from Kyriv National University
Goals & Motivations
Improve overall skills to meet with the Canadian professional standards
Pain Points
Her Ukraine education is often overlooked
Occupational English is challenging to learn
No connections for referrals
Difficulty finding community in Canada
Difficulty with the Canadian work culture immersion
Gonzalez
Current Psychology Student @ UBC
Goals & Motivations
Build connections with employers and those in the professional field to gain better job opportunities
Pain Points
Occupational language barrier
At risk of not being able to be paid the proper salary depending on his skills
Difficulty with the Canadian work culture
Ideate
Feature Brainstorming
Based on our findings and pain points we wanted to address, we made a list of features we would like to incorporate in the design and ranked them based on what is the most needed.
Competitive Analysis
With the limited time we had, we mainly focused our research on competitive analysis as many of the features we wanted to include were present in a few platforms. We looked into ADPList, Google Translate, and Resume Worded as platforms that we have used before to assist us in the job searching process, with features such as mentorship and resume review.
User Flow
Once we determined our must have features, we created a user flow to map out what the user must do to access the different app features.
Prototype
Low Fidelity Wireframes
With the user flow in mind and to map out the screens my team needed to create, I led the low fidelity wireframing. We created wireframes for both web and mobile. Whatever features were wireframed for web would be mirrored in the mobile version. One main thing that we wanted to have was the dashboard where users can see all their resources in one place, such as saved jobs, any mentorship appointments, resume feedback, etc.
Style Guide
We also curated our style guide to ensure consistency as we each worked on our own task. We wanted to keep our overall style simple so that the user won't be overwhelmed when using the app.
Test
Hi-fidelity Wireframes
Then we began designing our high fidelity wireframes, keeping in mind the style we wanted.
Mobile
Web
Final Features
Import Job Postings
Job postings from ANY site can be saved in 3 ways: manually copying the link, using the browser extension, or directly sharing from the job board mobile application.
Parse and Translate Job Postings
Any imported job postings will be scanned and can be translated it to any language.
Mentorship Support
Unsure about what skills you need for specific jobs and how you can get hired? Find a professional in the field and book a mentorship session with them.
Resume Review
Utilizing our AI services, get detailed feedback on your resume's impact and ATS compliance.
Final Flow
Demo
Results
After a long straight 12+ hours of work, we were given the opportunity to present our pitch to a panel of judges consisting of professional product designers in the field. During the finals ceremony, we presented our pitch live to all participants and final round judges. And I'm proud to say that...
We won first place! 🥇
What I learned
Key Takeaways
This opportunity was such a great experience for me. As one of my first product design sprints, I learned a lot, especially when it comes to the design process and the amount of work that goes into designing a solution.
🎨 Importance of style guide and consistency
By creating a style guide, it made collaborating on the project way easier and helped all of us to be on the same page when it came to designing Avenir. Overall, we worked more efficiently and finished our solution in the tight deadline
🔎 Importance of research and competitive analysis
Competitor analysis was a key step in creating our final solution. It helped us to identify how we can make a more accessible and effective product with already existing features in other platforms, and improve on any pain points that these platforms have.
Next Steps
🌎 Expanding outside Canada and to other countries
Currently, Avenir is only limited to those in Canada. It would be nice to add features to make it regional and help newcomers to other countries.
